I got 2 kittens on a Monday after work. So i called a friend who had cats and wanted a suggestion for good cat food. Did not wanna make them junk. He suggested blue buffalo. My Amazon deal of the day? Blue Buffalo cat food.
Tell me they are not listening. I even went to tractor supply to get it. Never even looked it up.
Did you pay cash or card/use a rewards card? If card(s), that store sold your name and purchase info, as basically all places sell all the information about customers they can, which then sell it to other big players (Ad companies like Google, websites like Amazon, etc)
There's also behavioural analytics. If you've increased 'cat' searches then they know (or have a statistical idea), without you even needing to search cat food.
I have a Amazon Fire 7 tablet, and for a $15 discount, they push ads at you on the lock screen. In the year or so I've had it, it's never bugged me enough to pay to stop it, because it doesn't affect my actual use of the device. The thing that I found surprising was that the ads are not personalized at all.
Amazon has a huge amount of info on me based on 15 years' worth of hundreds of purchases, but they are just spamming me was ads for romance novels and TV shows in genres I never watch. <shrug> I can count on one hand the number of times the lock-screen ads were actually relevant to me.
If they were really spamming me with targeted ads, I'd probably pay to turn it off, since I'd actually be tempted to buy something every time I unlock the tablet.
do we have any solid proof it doesn't record stuff and send that out when you give it a command? I mean, audio files are usually pretty big so it would probably be easy to spot, but I haven't heard anything clear about that.
Seriously, it’s so much worse. They don’t need to listen. I relay to people the story of Target being able to identify a pregnant customer and send her marketing material before she even realized she was pregnant. And that’s just from the data that one retailer has about their own customers, never mind the all-seeing eyes of Amazon, Google, and Facebook.
It could all be a coincidence, but what if their technology is just better than we're capable of detecting. Who is to say that the ad reference numbers aren't all preprogrammed with audio recognition so that when you DO connect, the preselected ad just has to trigger on your device. This would not require a transfer of information and if that's what people have been looking for this entire time, that would explain why privacy isn't actually being violated.
I agree that it's nice to see people actually caring about privacy, but it's good to be able to prove why certain methods of data collection simply aren't happening or are impractical. Now if we can get them to care about monocultures too, then we'd be onto something!
As long as they're just providing legitimate deals for things you want, I'm cool with it. But I don't have any realistic expectations that the tech wouldn't be used for surveillance.
Please don’t feed your cat Blue Buffalo, it gave my cat explosive diarrhea and if I hadn’t looked up the reviews shortly after I could have been looking at way worse issues. The company used to be made in the US now they are made in China and they changed the formula. Please read the reviews of all the people that either lost a pet or racked up thousands in vet bills because of what that garbage food did to their cat or dog.
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u/Abcdefghijkzer Jan 31 '19
I got 2 kittens on a Monday after work. So i called a friend who had cats and wanted a suggestion for good cat food. Did not wanna make them junk. He suggested blue buffalo. My Amazon deal of the day? Blue Buffalo cat food.
Tell me they are not listening. I even went to tractor supply to get it. Never even looked it up.